Thursday, September 13, 2012

Shitty Things My Mom Did Thursdays

So I started a post the other day about my mom, and how I'm envious of people who have good relationships with their mothers. I have never had that. In fact I've had the opposite of that my entire life. In short my mom wanted a prissy little girl who she could doll up, and who would be prim and proper and quiet, and china doll like. She did not get that at all, and for most of my life I've felt what I guess is best described as resentment. Well, that post turned into a freaking book, so I decided I'd hit it in snip-its. God knows I have enough material to last a while, and she keeps giving me more.

I guess I can start with a small back story: I'm the youngest of 4 kids for my mom. Her first born J, was a son who was born with a heart condition and only lived for a few days. G, her second born, also a son. They were both from her first marriage. Along comes my dad, who has a daughter from a first marriage, P. Then comes along my older brother D, and myself. Not one big happy family. I have memories of happy times, but the bad ones far outweigh the good. I think the first mention of divorce from them came when I was around 6, and they finally followed through with it when I was 12.

I guess for today I'll talk about that, the divorce. My mom and I had never been close, I was not the little girl she wanted and she made that very clear. I was a tomboy and a daddy's girl through and through, he did everything for me and with me. There was always love and affection from him, and understanding, and all the things I rarely got from my mom, discipline too when I needed it. So at 12, when they finally decided they were done with the bullshit, and actually separated, it was no contest who I was going to live with. The state of Virginia gives you a choice at that age, as long as there's no reason to NOT let you go with a particular parent, so there would be no fighting about custody. My mom never asked me to go with her, never made any indication that she'd want me to. I'm not sure why it even needed to be spoken, but at some point she made me come out and say that I was going to live with my dad. And from that moment things went from already bad to worse. She completely disowned me. (We do speak and see each other now, but didn't from the time I was 12 until I was 18, and I made the effort; she never would have) She stopped fixing me meals, she stopped taking me to sports practice, she stopped doing everything for me. She actually made to to where I couldn't get to the food in our house. It's not as ghetto/redneck as it sounds but we lived in a trailer when I was a toddler, and then built a house beside it, instead of doing away with the trailer,they connected the two with a hallway. To give us more room, because we didn't build a huge house (3br/1bath), so since we already had a kitchen in the trailer, there wasn't one in the house section. The section with my bedroom. They instead turned that into a laundry room. (I wish I had pictures of it, because it was actually pretty nice, and not nearly as ridiculous and hideous as it sounds lol). The trailer section had a separate set of locks and keys, and my mom considered the trailer section "hers" since it was where she was sleeping for the time being.

Can you see where this is going? Yeah. She took my copy of that particular key and locked me out of "her" part of the house. The part with the kitchen. And the food. My dad and I were moving in about two weeks if I remember correctly (it wasn't long regardless), and she was supposed to be gone to where ever she was going before that. But until then I was just shit out of luck. My dad worked 3 shift swing, and we lived in the middle of BFE, so there weren't a whole lot of options or things to do. So I ended up with a cooler full of ice, with some milk, and some lunch meats, and I got to live off of that for the most part, while my dad was working. Even my brother wouldn't let me in when our mom was gone to work. She also neglected to pay the power bill, so one day while I was home by myself the electric company guy came by and asked if my parents had left me a check. My dad didn't know that it hadn't been taken care of so obviously he didn't. And my mom was having nothing at all to do with me, so of course she didn't either. So he didn't have a choice and there I was with no power either. At that point my dad took me to stay with my aunt and uncle until we could get moved, but I'm still shocked to this day that she did those things.

I'll never understand how a parent can act that way to their child, or to one child in particular and not their others. Many times my mom has blamed me for how she acted, and has never once owned up to anything she did or said, or continues to say. I dealt with my "mommy issues" a long time ago, and I have zero expectations of her now, and haven't for a long time. Somehow she still manages to get under my skin (maybe I still have issues? I don't know) so I think it's kind of my own therapy to get it out here. I know for sure I'm not alone in the shitty parent recipient boat. But she did definitely teach me one thing and that's how NOT to be towards my own children.